Yeah, I was wondering when someone was going to bring up the millions of Soviets who surrendered to the Germans. Or what about the thousands of Soviets who switched sides and fought for the Germans? If the Soviets were so tough and never surrendery, why did millions of them surrender to Stalin & company and get sent to gulags? Courage is as necessary to winning a war as shoes are. It’s pretty hard to win a war without shoes or courage. But if you’re expecting to win a war just because you have massive amounts of courage or shoes, be prepared to have your country trashed by people who have adequate amounts of courage and shoes, and massive amounts of explosives.
Re. the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: according to Wikipedia, about 13,000 jews were killed in the uprising and about 50,000 prisoners deported to concentration camps. Only a handful of resistance fighters escaped. German losses are unknown because they were deliberately played down but were probably only a few hundred killed and wounded.
Granted the Warsaw Jews were in a terrible position, but still not a very triumphant resistance.
In 1919, Germany passed a law outlawing all firearms ownership. In 1928, they passed another law relegalizing it but requiring people who owned, carried, or sold firearms to be licensed. In 1938, they passed a law removing the requirements to license rifles and shotguns, reducing the age someone could get a handgun permit to 18 from 20, banning Jews from carrying weapons, increasing the length of the weapon permit, and increasing the number of people who were exempt from the permit law.
A friend who served a couple of tours in UN peacekeeping forces told us of an incident when he was in Lebanon where the Israelis began shelling an area near a Finnish UN post. The Finns contacted the Israelis, who refused to stop the shelling, so the Finns drove their APC into the target zone and radioed UN HQ that they were under artillery fire. The shelling stopped. Badass is right!